Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509150026
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BARBARA CROSSETTE THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It involved lipsticks and bras - but not to jettison the former or burn the latter. On the contrary. The women hoped to stock cosmetics and lingerie to be sold door to door in conservative Islamic neighborhoods where only the men could go out to shop, and their wives and daughters could not choose even their most intimate attire.
The marketing plan promised two freedoms: some independent income for poor women, and a little choice in life for others.
In Asia, Africa and Latin America, such small initiatives in economic development - a milk-producing goat for a village woman in Bangladesh, a wooden stall for a fruit grower in South India, farm tools for an African, a sewing machine in Trinidad - have become hallmarks of a new women's movement that differs markedly in scale, style and substance from the traditional feminism of the industrial West.
While women in the richer nations, now known as ``the North,'' bicker over history and theory and the question of whether it is demeaning even to talk about women's rights separate from human rights, women of ``the South,'' in what was once called the Third World, are organizing in phenomenal numbers for pragmatic goals: access to capital, the right of inheritance, basic education for girls, a voice in the political establishment and medical systems that let them make choices, especially in reproductive health.
The proliferation of homegrown projects in developing countries has moved both the focus and momentum of the women's movement worldwide away from the developed world, where Western-style feminists have become increasingly irrelevant, and toward the developing world.
Now feminists from rich nations are more likely to be supporters of the global women's movement, not its leaders. Indeed, the women who flocked to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing from the developing world dismissed as nonsense the criticisms of those who say that the agenda of the meeting was created by and for Western feminists.
As women around the world prepared for the conference, for instance, many agreed that the preparatory meetings over the last year in Africa were the liveliest and most intense.
When computers crashed at the final round of meetings in Dakar, Senegal, African women, always good storytellers, recreated their agenda in their heads overnight and hand-wrote their document. ``When the energy goes, we provide our own,'' said Gertrude Mongella, a Tanzanian and secretary-general of the Beijing women's conference.
Rounaq Jahan, a Bangladeshi political scientist and the author of ``The Elusive Agenda: Mainstreaming Women in Development,'' said Asian women agree that much of the exhilaration left in feminism is in the developing world.
``While the feminist movement seems to have peaked in the North by the 1970s,'' she said, ``in many countries of the South it is still young and vibrant.''
Perhaps this is because in the developing world, the women's movement is much more a matter of life and death.
Outside a small clinic on the fringe of a slum in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, mothers and children huddling for hours in an open-air waiting room demonstrated the drawing power and the importance of small women's organizations.
At this clinic, run by the independent Bangladesh Women's Health Coalition, a bone-thin, seriously anemic woman was slouched on the edge of an examining table waiting for contraceptives. A sympathetic female doctor told her that delaying the birth of another child was not enough; if she did not accept diet supplements and look after her health, mental and physical, she would die.
In such small institutions, it is not only women's bodies that matter. Their vocations, habits, needs and desires are treated as important. And the women are encouraged to think beyond their homes.
The Dhaka clinic that was mobbed with women and children one day was almost empty on another because both staff and patients had volunteered as neighborhood election observers.
In several cities in India, women's organizations are focused on the issue of pervasive, often fatal domestic violence. This summer, for instance, a well known politician was accused of murdering his wife and having her body stuffed into a restaurant's tandoor oven, prompting demonstrations of outraged women.
And their involvement doesn't stop with protest. Women often find themselves wading into police and court procedures, civil rights law and media work. Knowing that for many women there is no economic alternative but to remain in abusive homes, women's groups are also trying to promote self-help vocational projects and low-cost housing for the victims of domestic violence.
In the last few years, a bold new idea has caught on - that women are the key to development. As a result, the women's movements in developing countries have picked up powerful allies from independent women's groups in Europe and the United States, from government aid agencies and from the World Bank.
The thinking now is that the poorest nations will never grow out of poverty unless women become a more active part of civil society. Without this, a country can forget population control, the eradication of epidemic diseases and even the conservation of its natural resources.
``No country can develop if half its human resources are devalued or repressed,'' Madeleine K. Albright, the chief U.S. representative at the United Nations told an audience in Beijing.
The World Bank, the primary lender to poor nations and an organization that has had plenty of opportunities to see why traditional aid does not always work, is busily planning new loans for women.
Bank officials say that in the last decade, the percentage of the institution's portfolio devoted to what they call ``gender concerns'' has risen from 10 percent to more than a third.
Of the $3.5 billion set aside for improving the status of women, the Bank says, $200 million is going into a new micro-credit program to provide tiny loans to women without collateral.
Poor women are surprisingly good investments everywhere, says Nancy Barry, the president of Women's World Banking, a 16-year-old nonprofit institution with affiliates in 40 developing countries.
Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, now the model for small-scale credit, lent women $400 million in 1994 - including some loans as small as $1 - and 97 percent of them were paid back.
``Women don't need charity, they need access,'' Barry said. And once they have it, they willingly trade information across national lines. Women in one country find out through personal networks and electronic communication which economic projects work in another country, and then they copy them. ``What works in Uganda will influence the Dominican Republic,'' Barry said.
All around the world, women are practical and realistic in their requests, rarely proposing grandiose schemes. In the southern Indian state of Karnataka, a leading politician said: ``If you ask the village people what they want, they won't ask for a medical college. They want bee hives or market stalls or a pump.''
``Women of Africa know what they want,'' Mongella said in interview. ``We don't need a prescription. We just need support to implement what we want to do.''
In African families, she said, there is a feeling that the policies dictated by international institutions have not so much trickled down as fallen on their heads. Something that looks good as a national policy can be devastating for a village.
An unexpected reversal has now begun. The vitality and immediacy of the women's movement in the southern half of the world is now catching on in the northern half.
Americans working in inner-city organizations and rural self-help projects in poor regions of the United States are beginning to see how much work can be done with very little money. They are studying successful immunization programs and self-help projects jump-started by small loans for would-be businesswomen.
American women are also learning how much farther the women in poor nations still have to go, said Barbara Arnwine, the executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
``American women do not realize that our sisters throughout the world do not have the kinds of enforceable rights that we have, that they do not have the ability to go to court and to say, `I have been denied a job,'''Arnwine said.
``They do not have the right to say, `I have been denied housing because I have children.' We hear stories of women being driven out of business in India, in Africa. Many women in the world, even in family courts, don't have the rights of men in custody cases.''
What women of the developing world do share with women in developed nations, though, is a revulsion against violence, said Mongella. Civil wars in Africa, Asia and also in the Balkans have made millions of women refugees or victims of genocide and rape.
``What benefit does the gun hold for the women?'' asked Mongella. No woman needs a gun. But give her a hoe or a water pump ``and she will make a change.''
by CNB